Strategy for creating this model in Blender from scratch
Like Jaco said, for something like this I would create the flat image in Illustrator and export as .svg. Then import that into blender and make it a mesh. Super simple and no need to spend time modelling it.
If you want to practise, I would make all the bars as separate objects then connect them all and merge. Might take some clean up afterwards but much easier than trying to work with loop cuts and extruding methods.